Press & Reviews

Being B.A.D., performed and written by Brittney S. Harris audience feedback:

•  "Bold. Alive. Determined. Brittney Harris’s solo performance of ‘Being B.A.D.’ is all of those things and more. In this piece, the Virginia Tech MFA Fellow takes the audience on a journey into one woman’s story—one woman, who is also many women. A vulnerable, nervous, yet powerful woman battling a life time off messages about behavior and relationships but who finally finds her voice within the noise that surrounds her. 

• This compelling performance delves into the complexity of gender-based violence and healing and aroused within me many emotions. Harris’s physicality and voice are artfully crafted giving this difficult piece a true sense of beauty. A performance that must been seen more than once in order to truly catch the nuances and layers, Harris brings the character of Kendra Foster to life. Kendra could be—and is—any woman. Sexual, domestic, relationship, and interpersonal violence impact too many women daily, and Harris’s piece brought to light some of the seemingly innocuous ways in which it manifests. 

• Harris uses her words and physicality to showcase the various ways in which gender-violence is enacted—hands gripping her throat, words used to cut her down. This piece is beautiful presented, and has the potential to bring tears to all who have the privilege to witness Harris in action.

Titus Andronicus, directed by Ray Paolino for the Drama Department of the University of Georgia, Fine Arts Theatre, University of Georgia, Athens (Ga.)

Reviewed by: Janice Valls-Russell and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, University Paul Vale´ry Montpellier 3, 12 April 2017

• "...Lavinia, in contrast, was petite and cast almost as a child figure. The absence of visible makeup, the austere hairstyle and tightly buttoned-up clothing, especially the blue coat she wore until the rape scene, contrasted with Tamora’s tall figure, in a panther-like costume, with a feline mane of hair. Lavinia’s white blouse and flared, mid-calf skirt seemed evocative of what an American schoolgirl might be wearing in the 1960s. Booties hid her legs. At the same time, breaking with the initial impression of doll-like submissiveness, her impassioned revelation of the rape brought to the fore the idea of books as tools of emancipation and empowerment. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, in a university context, this staging underscored how a victim may speak out through books, through the classics, in a powerful rendering of Shakespeare’s dramatic scene, when Lavinia physically grapples with her Ovid to reveal her fate through the myth of Philomel. This importance of words was also in keeping with the director’s overall attention to the text of the play, apparent in the blocking that tended to favour frontal delivery, so that the audience could (re)discover the extent to which the language is, to quote Paolino, ‘beautiful . . . rich . . . muscular’, an ideal medium through which to invite audiences to probe their own responses to violence.   To these reviewers, who saw this production after visiting the Georgia Museum of Art, also on campus, and its wonderful collection of African American Art, and who wrote this after visiting Atlanta’s Center for Civil and Human Rights, this Lavinia was a Lavinia from the South, simultaneously speaking out to all of us and in the name of all victims, and this production a fitting reminder that, to echo William Faulkner and an upcoming exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art, ‘the past is never dead’.